Aptima, Inc., a trailblazer in leveraging artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to enhance mission readiness, announced today that it recently completed a $1.4 Million Missile Defense Agency Phase II Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) award to develop an interactive cognitive assistant to broaden the bench of analytical personnel.

Aptima and partners Central Washington University and nou Systems are developing QUARTERMASTER to help DoD analysts focus on questions of interest rather than the means of answering them. QUARTERMASTER (Query and User-based Abductive Reporting Tool Enabling Responsive Multimodal Analysis of Simulated Technological Enterprise Records), is an interactive cognitive assistant meant to broaden the bench of analytical personnel. QUARTERMASTER allows analysts to express domain-specific questions in natural language to retrieve quantitative data of interest, eliminating the need to know data structure or database query languages. Moreover, QUARTERMASTER can augment these data with analyses of its own to aid human reasoning. It is also capable of explaining how it obtained a particular outcome. QUARTERMASTER is conceptually novel in several ways: (1) it uses natural language processing for querying simulation tasks that are inherently quantitative; (2) it is domain-specific; (3) it efficiently bridges both ontologies and databases; and (4) it uses causal reasoning to infer user intent and meaning as well as the root causes of results returned from database queries. Ultimately, QUARTERMASTER will empower analysts at all expertise levels to query their datasets naturally and thus contribute to faster and more complete analyses of simulations. Approved for Public Release |21-MDA-10789 (21 Apr 21)]

QUARTERMASTER is a member of Aptima’s Cognitive Augmentation Technologies (CAT) portfolio of assistive technologies that augment the cognitive performance of humans in data-intensive, mission-critical environments from military missions to healthcare. CAT solutions feature custom artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and interactive modalities that learn user work patterns and expectations, predict information needs for more efficient, perform insightful problem solving, enhance situational awareness and decision support, and allocate tasks for optimal workflow and human-machine collaboration.

Aptima welcomes the adoption or merging of your technology with one or more of our SBIR Topics. We are eligible for SBIR Enhancement funding, as well as TACFI and STRATFI awards, all of which are sole source.

For more information about QUARTERMASTER, please contact aptima_info@aptima.com.

Photo by Jason Cutshaw/U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command